The living room carpet is covered in needles, the potato salad covered in mould: as we heave ourselves up out of the year that’s gone and prepare to belly-flop our way into the year that is to come, it’s time to pause a while and look at what we’ve all been reading. So in our traditional spirit of openness , with only the briefest mention of the traditional caveats, let’s take a look at the top 10 stories of 2015 on the Books site.

Except maybe we should be rushing to the barricades instead, because here comes the revolution. Right there at the top of this year’s list is Paul Mason’s ringing declaration that the end of capitalism has begun. The signs of its imminent demise may be difficult to spot during the festive season’s orgy of consumerism, but according to Mason, the old order is already under threat from technologies that allow new ways of working.

Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours.

Mason’s vision of a postcapitalist world brought on by increasing automation, abundant information and collaborative production ignited a fierce debate below the line and across social media. For Mason, information is “incapable of being owned or exploited or priced” – a maxim aptly demonstrated by the fact his argument has already been shared around the web more than 350,000 times.

No space for JRR Tolkien on McCrum’s latest list, but news of a map showing Middle-earth, annotated in the author’s hand was this year’s fourth most popular story. The writer’s additions in pencil and green ink attest to his detailed grasp of the world he had created – the trees in Mirkwood are apparently “FIR”, while Hobbiton is “assumed to be approx at latitude of Oxford” – a world made all the more beautiful by the sense of a precious wilderness under threat from brutish man.

It’s a threat that’s increasingly urgent in the real world, according to Yuval Noah Harari, whose indictment of humanity’s disregard for the natural world appears at number five. “The march of human progress is strewn with dead animals,” Harari argues, charting a trail of destruction that reaches from continent-wide massacres of large mammals in the stone age to the billions of chickens crouching in cramped cages all around the globe at this very moment. As our scientific knowledge increases, so does our influence over the other organisms with which we share this planet and the responsibility we bear to treat them as we would be treated ourselves.

Go Set a Watchman returns at number eight – though returning in the most painful sense, with news that American bookshop Brilliant Books judged Lee’s bestselling novel not … er … brilliant enough and was offering disappointed customers a refund. The publisher’s decision to present it as “Harper Lee’s New Novel” instead of “a rough beginning for a classic” was “disappointing and frankly shameful”, the bookshop declared, comparing it to James Joyce’s Stephen Hero – an abandoned version of his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “Hero was eventually released as an academic piece for scholars and fans – not as a new Joyce novel. We would have been delighted to see Go Set a Watchman receive a similar fate.”